Language Development: Understanding Language Diversity in the Classroom offers comprehensive coverage of the language development process for pre- and in-service teachers while emphasizing the factors that further academic success in the classroom, including literacy skills, phonological awareness, and narrative. With chapters written by respected…

This paper describes staff perceptions of the implementation of an alternative curriculum, Skill Force, for disaffected pupils in the UK. The perceptions of Skill Force and school staff were compared based on data from questionnaires completed by 62 Skill Force and 84 school staff, and interviews with representative samples of each. While the data…

A study investigated the effectiveness of structured viewing of television news on listening comprehension in English as a Second Language (ESL), as compared with the effectiveness of standard listening comprehension materials. Subjects were 66 students aged 18-22 in diverse disciplines, 34 in the experimental group and 32 in a control group.…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with the following topics: observable behaviors and verbal responses elicited by a specific listening task; the relationship between oral spelling, auditory sequencing, and vocal rhythm; the effect of listening…

Research in training subjects to comprehend compressed speech has led to deeper studies of basic listening skills. The connected discourse is produced by a technique which deletes segments of the speech record and joins the remainder together without pitch distortion. The two problems dealt with were the sources of individual differences in the…

A practicum was designed to improve the oral/aural vocabulary which would eventually improve the reading vocabulary of second language learners. The practicum, implemented in a second grade by a media specialist who counted on the cooperation of the classroom teacher, consisted of a read-aloud program in which the students read daily from a…

A screening instrument developed for this study measured the listening skills of 22 children in a kindergarten class. Children were found to be weak in four areas of listening: (1) auditory discrimination; (2) auditory perception; (3) following oral directions; and (4) listening comprehension. After these measures were administered, students…

Research studies have pointed to a similarity between reading and listening that may imply that listening to writing is likely to be a useful means of evaluating it. Therefore a study was designed to determine the extent to which holistic scores assigned to student essays by readers correlate with holistic scores assigned to the same essays by…

Listening remains generally unappreciated while being the communicative skill most used and essential to the human condition. There is no name for the condition of being unable to listen, but the term "illistenacy" could be used. An individual who can hear but cannot consciously attend, understand, and respond to non-written messages in…

Fifteen classes of first, second, and third grade students in five Clarke County, Georgia, schools listened to poems and rated them on a three-point scale. Five of these 15 classes also participated in the study's second phase, which measured responses to the same poems after some poetry and related extension activities. Analysis revealed that the…

This study investigates both immediate and delayed effects of two different training procedures on children's listener behavior in a referential communication setting. Using a 2 x 2 design, the presence and absence of a plan for effective listening and modeling of appropriate listener behavior were varied, and the effects of these variations on 40…

Recently those in the teaching profession have begun to realize the importance of listening skills. Of the 4 areas of language arts, listening is the primary skill. Phonics and listening are related in that there is a significant relationship between the child's ability to discriminate between letter sounds and his ability to listen. The child…

This paper describes an approach to the teaching of listening comprehension for English as a second language. Its goals include improving the students' understanding of lectures and lecture-like materials and taking into account the knowledge that the student brings with him to the listening situation. The materials used in this approach consist…

An analysis was made of the data from a single criterion-referenced test which was constructed to measure a hierarchy of skills in listening and reading comprehension and which was administered to 1,186 subjects in grades 2, 5, 8, and 11. The research was concerned with the applicability of a hierarchically ordered achievement test to the…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of specific instructional strategies in listening upon the reading comprehension of first grade pupils. Listening instruction was hypothesized to positively affect reading comprehension. Eighteen first grade classrooms were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: (1) specific listening…